aristocracy; that it is ready at any moment to
vote for Blater, and the right of meeting in
the Parks, and that it hates all placemen,
holders of sinecures, and the privileged classes
generally. Yet, I found it to be the unanimous
opinion of the High-street, more particularly
towards its lower end, that the demolition of
the toll-gate would be highly prejudicial to its
interests, that it was a most unwarrantable and
unconstitutional proceeding, and that it was
directly inimical to the rights of man keeping
shop in that vicinity. There was a decided
disposition to connect the abolition of toll-gates
in general, and of that toll-gate in particular,
with the baleful influence of a grasping
hierarchy and a bloated aristocracy; and I am
sure that the connexion would have been
logically and conclusively established if the
High-street had only seen how to do it. At one
corner, the High-street, being interested in
beer and the choicest spirits at dock prices,
including old vatted rum, was quite clear that in
a mysterious manner, not capable of lucid
explanation, but indubitable nevertheless, the
removal of the toll-gate would have much the
same effect on beer and spirits as an advance in
the price of hops, or an increase in the excise
duty. A little higher up, the High-street, being
interested in tobacco, as regards one window,
and invisible perukes as regards the other,
gloomily resigned itself to the conviction that
when the gate was removed society at large
would give up smoking, and cease to be bald.
Next door but one, the High-street, being
professionally engaged in making up gentlemen's
own material, had also made up its mind that
the gate and the habits of civilisation would
disappear together, and that mankind would,
with the stroke of twelve that night,
incontinently return to nudity and blue paint. At
a particular corner, on the pavement, the High-
street being concerned in trotters, saw in the
destruction of the gate a fatal blow to pork,
tending to the ultimate extinction of that useful
though not ornamental animal, the pig; at the
same time opening up a broad and clear road
leading to the workhouse. In fact, the High-
street, though thoroughly radical when other
persons are concerned, was, on this occasion,
when the party concerned was the High-street
itself, eminently conservative.

On the other hand, the drivers and
conductors of cabs and omnibuses, whose interests
lay in a different direction, and whose views had
no doubt been enlarged by a daily survey of
mankind from 'Igate to the Habbey, contemplated
the dissolution of the gate with undisguised
satisfaction, while the juvenile population,
at all times strongly iconoclastic, was preparing
to celebrate the occasion in a becoming manner,
and to seize the earliest moment, when the
protection of the law should be withdrawn, to
break the toll-gate's windows.

Through this terrible war of mental elements
I made my way to the doomed gate, and,
accosting Mr. Brown, hoped I saw him well, or at
least as well as could be expected under the
melancholy circumstances. How often it
happens in life that the man whom, when you did
not know him, you regarded as haughty and
unapproachable, proves, when you do come to
know him, to be the most affable fellow imaginable!
I had not been two minutes in Mr.
Brown's company, before I perceived that in
walking round him and beating about him I
had entirely mistaken Mr. Brown's nature and
wasted my own time. I might have approached
him with a peace-offering of a pot of beer, and
been received with joy; I might have paved
the way with a bundle of cigars, and found it
the direct road to his affections. I imagined
him to be a great frozen block of reserve, but I
knew now that I might have melted him
throughout with three-penn'orth warm. I
conceived him to be a pillar of darkness; I
discovered that I might have lighted him up with
a pickwick.

Would Mr. Brown take anything? Mr.
Brown's ready apprehension of the significance
of this masonic form of interrogatory made me
almost painfully sensible of the absurdity of
having suspected him of teetotalism. Mr.
Brown would take anything, but, for choice, old
ale. The way in which one of Mr. Brown's
boys, on receiving a shilling, annihilated time
and space and disappeared through a double
swing door leading to the region of old vatted
rum, was suggestive of lightning. Did Mr.
Brown smoke? Mr. Brown, casting his eye
towards the tall red chimney that erected itself
from the flat roof of the toll-gate like an
inflamed mark of admiration, said that he could:
evidently implying that, as regards smoking, a
flue with a short draught was a fool to him. For
choice, Mr. Brown took returns—and I had
hesitated to approach him with regalias!

Was Mr. Brown sorry that the gate was about
to be done away with? This timidly and
gingerly, lest Mr. Brown might resent any
interference with his private affairs. But Mr. Brown
had no reserve. He put himself at once on the
footing of a sworn witness on a highway
committee.

"Sorry! Lor' bless you, sir, I shall be jolly
glad when twelve o'clock comes, and it's all
over. You wouldn't believe the life the 'busmen
and the cabbies have been a leading me for
a week past; ah, for a month a' most. To-day
it has been dreadful. And you may be as good
at chaff as you like, but you can't have an
answer ready for every one. Me and my boys
have been making up things to say all the
morning, and we've given it to a few of them
pretty hot, though, of course, some of them had
the best of us. There's a surly old fellow as
generally goes round the crescent and evades
the gate when he can, but the other day he was
obliged to come through.

"'Ah!' he says, ' there will be no gates after
Friday.'

"'Oh yes there will,' I says; ' they're going
to leave one on your account.'

"' Which gate is that?' he says.

"'Why, Newgate!' I says.